UPC offering 30Mbps broadband and problems with upgrade

Ranicand

John2009 wrote: »

I'm going to turn the wireless off on the router and connect back up directly with my ethernet cable, and turn off the router for 10 minutes go for a smoke come back and do a few more test's for you folks.

Your speeds will get better now people are going to bed now in increasing numbers.

John2009

But then i get this, lol

Ranicand

John2009 wrote: »

But then i get this, lol

Here we go things getting better as we get further into the early hours.



Now I would be happy enough with that at peak but not this.

Ranicand

Ranicand2 wrote: »

Here we go things getting better as we get further into the early hours.



Now I would be happy enough with that at peak but not this.

People saying this is not contention are talking pure rubbish.

John2009

Back again with my laptop wired to the router with wireless switched off on both my laptop and router, the same iso file as earlier.

Ranicand

John2009 wrote: »

Back again with my laptop wired to the router with wireless switched off on both my laptop and router, the same iso file as earlier.

My speeds are going up too and I have not changed anything.

John2009

Now



Earlier

Ranicand

John2009 wrote: »

Now



Earlier

Now

Earlier


I am still way short of 30meg have to wait till about 3.am for that.

Contention has been proved.

Edit getting better.

Moriarty

Ranicand2 wrote: »

My speeds are going up too and I have not changed anything.

No, all you know is that your speedtest.net results are increasing. You don't know whether it's neighbours turning off their laptops and decongesting the local wifi spectrum, giving you increased bandwidth to your home router, or people going to bed in Ireland in general and not hammering the speedtest.net server so that it can give you better results, or whether it was all down to actual contention of your cable connection.

Unless you rule out the normal things that cause loads of people poor performance, your results are entirely meaningless.

Ranicand

Moriarty wrote: »

No, all you know is that your speedtest.net results are increasing. You don't know whether it's neighbours turning off their laptops and decongesting the local wifi spectrum, giving you increased bandwidth to your home router, or people going to bed in Ireland in general and not hammering the speedtest.net server so that it can give you better results, or whether it was all down to actual contention of your cable connection.

Unless you rule out the normal things that cause loads of people poor performance, your results are entirely meaningless.

Rubbish I am not on wireless I am on a wired connection.

Funny how my youtube is now usable along with other video sites.

Also the UPC speed test gives me almost the exact same results as speedtest all the time.

Moriarty

You're an idiot. But I wont hold that against you.

Speedtest results are entirely unreliable as an indication of maximum available bandwidth. They are at best worth no more than the equivalent of 'it feels [slow|fast]'.

What I'm saying is that it's a lot better if everyone gets more reliable information - then everyone can be clear if there's a problem, and it's harder for an operator to deny that there is a problem. People may even learn something along the way on how to improve their own broadband speeds, which can only be a good thing for all involved.

Ranicand

Moriarty wrote: »

You're an idiot. But I wont hold that against you.

Speedtest results are entirely unreliable as an indication of maximum available bandwidth. They are at best worth no more than the equivalent of 'it feels [slow|fast]'.

What I'm saying is that it's a lot better if everyone gets more reliable information - then everyone can be clear if there's a problem, and it's harder for an operator to deny that there is a problem. People may even learn something along the way on how to improve their own broadband speeds, which can only be a good thing for all involved.

I am reporting you for that.

For other people reading I had no problem before the so called upgrade.

center15

Moriarty wrote: »

You're an idiot. But I wont hold that against you.

Try learning some manners, if you don't want to be helpful then get off the forum.

John2009

Moriarty wrote: »

You're an idiot.

No need for that chap.

I think alot of the posters here posting on this particular thread are in full agreement that UPC is suffering from bad contention from mid afternoon until late into the early hours of the morning,

wether it be a wireless result from a few feet from your router or connected directly via an ethernet cable the results are still huge speed differences.

I pay 42euro a month for 30MB Fibre Power broadband from UPC plus a 3euro surcharge for not being able to pay by direct debit ( Post Office suits me fine ), i dont mind and can live with a 25% decrease in speeds at peak times but not 60%, 70% or even an 80% drop in speeds for the times when i'm most on line and want to use my speeds to the maximum and to get value for the money i pay them each week.

Ranicand

For others reading speedtests are not exact but they are a pretty good guide to your connection when two other speed sites are returning the same results this factors out most errors.

Also on Sunday the traffic on those sites is not going to be high.

I am on a wired connection and I tried downloading large files and these have matched my speed test results bad from about 8 and fast improving since midnight.

There is a margin for error on speed test sites and it gets bigger the further away the server.

I have compared my results on a number of sites and when they are low my connection performance is bad on video sites.

Now that dirt ignorant poster is correct speed tests are not perfect but the more of them you use the better picture you can built up.

I do not use wireless on my PC and this problem only reared it's ugly head since the upgrade.

Now to rely on test results alone would be silly but they provide a good snapshot.

I only use the tests when I notice my connection dying on all other sites that require high bandwidth.


There is another test which may not be perfect my real speed may be higher but it's not lower and with this reading I am getting great performance on the video sites.

During peak time I was getting 3meg on that site and others along with videos not streaming properly for me.

I rest my case it's contention.

John2009

To Ranicand2 or any other person that has knowledge of how the likes of UPC network works, my question is that how big of a job would it be for UPC to add in extra bandwidth to my line or the area below the pavement where they have their connections, taps or what ever there called?

Ranicand

John2009 wrote: »

To Ranicand2 or any others person that has knowledge of how the likes of UPC's network works, my question is that how big of a job would it be for UPC to add in extra bandwidth to my line or the area below the pavement where they have their connections, taps or what ever there called?

Ok the contention ratio is 17 to 1 so we are told so for every 30meg available there are 17 people.

There are two separate channels we use the up channel and the down channel.
The down channel runs at 270Mb and 17 people for every 30meg is 9 by 17 is 153.

So that is 153 people per channel so 9 people running at full speed can use up the lot.

When there is not enough to go around speeds are cut for everybody on that channel to share is out in a fare way.

UPC will be rolling out docsis 3.0 later this year and by getting a new modem we will be able to run from four down channels at once to suck up our speed.

Not 100% sure on the numbers above but they are close enough.


More people gone to bed.

John2009

When you say the down channel runs at 270MB, can UPC add on another 100MB or 200MB at their ease or would that be a major overhaul and cost alot of money to implement?

Ranicand

John2009 wrote: »

When you say the down channel runs at 270MB, can UPC add on another 100MB or 200MB at their ease or would that be a major overhaul and cost alot of money to implement?

They can add more down channels but each channel can only run at 270Mb.

You sent a request on the up channel and it is sent to you on the down channel.

The modems we have now can only use one down channel at a time so if the channel is responding to a lot of packet requests you have to wait that bit longer.

Docsis 3.0 modems which will be rolled out this year can use four down channels at once so you might get 8meg on one 10 off another and so on.

This system creates a bigger pool of users and should improve things vastly.

There is a wiki page about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS


DOCSIS 3.0 features management over IPv6 and channel bonding, which enables multiple downstream and upstream channels to be used together at the same time by a single subscriber.


Edit still going up.

the_law

Ranicand2 wrote: »

Not 100% sure on the numbers above but they are close enough.

Ranicand2, no disrespect but you're not even in the right ballpark. Would be interested to know where you got your numbers from?

The coaxial cable that comes to your house (in an upgraded area) has a bandwidth of well over 500Mhz. Blocks of that (channels) are allocated to various functions. Most of them carry TV. Some carry downstream data (from Internet to customer) and some carry upstream data (customer to Internet).

DOCSIS 1 and 2 cable modems connect to one of the upstream channels and one of the downstream channels. The downstream channels carry 38Mbit each. This is shared between everybody on that channel.

In my area there are two downstream channels in use, 482Mhz and 490Mhz. So UPC have 76Mbit available to them, allowing them to sell 17 times this i.e. 1292Mbits.

John2009, adding extra bandwidth to your area does not require any rewiring. Remember how different frequency blocks on the cable are allocated to different things (TV channels, Internet access etc)? UPC need to assign another channel to internet access, which makes more speed available.

Where DOCSIS 3 has relevance to bandwidth is that it uses several channels simultaneously, allowing maximum speeds greater than 38Mbit.

Ranicand

the_law wrote: »

Ranicand2, no disrespect but you're not even in the right ballpark. Would be interested to know where you got your numbers from?

The coaxial cable that comes to your house (in an upgraded area) has a bandwidth of well over 500Mhz. Blocks of that (channels) are allocated to various functions. Most of them carry TV. Some carry downstream data (from Internet to customer) and some carry upstream data (customer to Internet).

DOCSIS 1 and 2 cable modems connect to one of the upstream channels and one of the downstream channels. The downstream channels carry 38Mbit each. This is shared between everybody on that channel.

In my area there are two downstream channels in use, 482Mhz and 490Mhz. So UPC have 76Mbit available to them, allowing them to sell 17 times this i.e. 1292Mbits.

John2009, adding extra bandwidth to your area does not require any rewiring. Remember how different frequency blocks on the cable are allocated to different things (TV channels, Internet access etc)? UPC need to assign another channel to internet access, which makes more speed available.

Where DOCSIS 3 has relevance to bandwidth is that it uses several channels simultaneously, allowing maximum speeds greater than 38Mbit.

I read that 270Mb on the board here I did say I was not 100% sure about the numbers.

I do understand the general idea of how it works.

Would you agree with me that this is contention?

the_law

Ranicand2 wrote: »

Would you agree with me that this is contention?

Absolutely.

Ranicand

the_law wrote: »

Absolutely.

Thanks.

Tony

I doubt there has been a big increase in customer numbers immediately after the upgrade and the available bandwidth to the local fibre node should be no less so at the very least speeds should not have decreased to less than their pre upgrade level.

Ranicand2 wrote: »

More people able to suck up more of the bandwidth at once.

jumbobreakfast

I got the 30mb/3mb but it's still no good for hosting games of CODMW2. everyone complains of lag. Why is the upload so flaky for hosting games? and will DOCSIS 3.0 improve this?

GigaByte

Moriarty wrote: »

What I'm saying is that it's a lot better if everyone gets more reliable information - then everyone can be clear if there's a problem, and it's harder for an operator to deny that there is a problem. People may even learn something along the way on how to improve their own broadband speeds, which can only be a good thing for all involved.

You could argue no speed tests are 100% reliable but if you had read the thread you would have read that UPC have admitted that there is a problem.

Tony

Yes albeit in a delayed manner,although they have not said what the issue is and in some cases they have used transmit levels as a smokescreen. If they came clean and honestly told us what was going on I'm sure most customers would be a lot happier.

GigaByte wrote: »

UPC have admitted that there is a problem.

GigaByte

Tony wrote: »

Yes albeit in a delayed manner,although they have not said what the issue is and in some cases they have used transmit levels as a smokescreen. If they came clean and honestly told us what was going on I'm sure most customers would be a lot happier.

I agree with that, I wouldn't mind if they told me it was going to be a month before the problem is fix.

IrishTonyO

Snake Plisken wrote: »

Ok so spent the last half hour awaiting to get to talk to tech support apparantly there is a big meeting on monday in UPC with their network people on a fix time to address this issue the girl makes out that its down to noise issue to the local node, she wasn't buying that it was a contention issue and I also advised her a lot of people were having similar issues in the lucan area and across the city, she said they were putting a plan in place on Monday and which would include fix time resolution, and credit to the affected customers and we should all be getting phone calls starting on monday to give us updates, I also mentioned people were keeping track of their speed issues via this forum and she said that UPC "monitor" boards.ie as well

As soon as anyone hears anything from UPC, please post an update as I reckon they have a large list of people to get in touch with.
Speeds are fine again until about 3pm or so

Gunty

I have registered on boards.ie after reading all the problems people are having with UPC. I was on a 3mb connection which I use for xbox live only and worked well. Before i upgraded the last week was un-playable. I have upgraded to the 5mb fibre powered since then which hasn’t been activated. I have been on to UPC numerous times complaining about this issue and have been told they are having no issues, eventually I’ve been told they will have an engineer out for Wednesday. After reading all the responses it looks like nothing will be fixed for me on Wednesday. Has anyone got any advice on what to say to the engineer as I’m not too technical about these issues. Also is it not about time somebody set up a petition to send to UPC??